‘Let the world know’
Second-generation Holocaust survivor gets message across in Blackstone talk
BLACKSTONE — Monika S. Curnett’s parents, Henry and Jolanthe Szynkarski, both lived through World War II and the Nazi reign of terror in Eastern Europe, but rarely spoke about their experiences while Curnett was growing up.
“For years no one talked about it it,” she says. “It’s taken years for my family and their friends to talk about what happened and to let the world know it happened.”
The story Curnett was able to cobble together from her parents over the years is one she tells to young people today, including a young audience of eighth-graders at the Frederick W.
Hartnett Middle School in Blackstone. Curnett was invited to speak to the students Friday by history teacher Kathy Finnegan, who has been teaching the history of the Holocaust for the past five years.
The curriculum-based program splits students into groups to research what was happening in various regions of Eastern Europe during the war. In English class, those same students will read The Diary of Anne Frank, followed by a class trip to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington in June.
Curnett’s Jewish-born father, Henry, was 20 years old and living in Częstochowa when Hitler’s army invaded Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, the start of the second World War. Curnett says German-directed upheavals to the Polish population were immediate and drastic. In the first months of the war, tens of thousands of Polish intellectuals, including many teachers and religious leaders, were killed.
“First they took the books and learning away and then children couldn’t go to school anymore,” she said.
Curnett’s grandfather, Jacob, was killed in the Częstochowa massacre, also known as Bloody Monday, which was committed by the German Wehrmacht forces four days later in the city of Częstochowa. The shootings, beatings and plunder continued for three days in more than a dozen separate locations around the city. Approximately 1,140 Polish civilians – 150 of whom were ethnically Jewish – were murdered.
“My father was just a few years older than you,” Curnett told the students. “My father was one of eight children and he saw his family members being brought to the city square and shot dead. He lost his parents, five sisters, his uncles and his nieces and nephews. Only my father and two of his sisters survived.”
One of his sisters, Rose, actually survived Auschwitz, the largest of the Nazi concentration and death camps, but died on the day the camp was liberated from an infected wound on her foot.
“I recently visited Auschwitz and saw the gas chambers,” Curnett said. “If you go you will see giant cases with shoes and suitcases. All the suitcases had a name on them. It was eye-opening and there wasn’t a dry eye in our tour group.”
By the end of the war, over 3 million Polish Jews were dead, with only 50,000 to 70,000 surviving, including Curnett’s father, who managed to stay alive by hiding in an underground bunker with seven other men.
“They were able to get some money together and pay a family who had a farm out in the country. They dug out an underground bunker and for two years they lived in a hole in the ground,” she said.
While Henry was struggling to stay alive in Poland, his future German-born wife, 13-year-old, Jolanthe Kischke, was living in Berlin about a mile from Hitler’s bunker.
“My mother worked in Hitler’s ammunition factory. To this day, she bears the guilt and horror of what her people did,” Curnett said.
Henry and Jolanthe married in Berlin two years after the war ended. She converted to Judaism in 1948 and they moved to Providence in 1951, two years before Curnett was born.
Her father died in 1993 and her mother, who is 91, is still living a healthy and active life.
“When I think about my family, I think of all the survivors because they are my extended family,” she said.
Curnett’s talk at the Frederick Hartnette Middle School coincided with a study released last week showing that 11 percent of American adults and 22 percent of American millennials do not know what the Holocaust is or have never heard of it.
“I read recently where some students at Pennsylvania State University were asked specific questions about World War II – like what was the Axis powers and where was Auschwitz – and a good majority of those students didn’t now the answer,” she told the students. “Most young people don’t know, but I’m happy to know that all of you know about it.”
Curnett says her mission when meeting with school students is to share her heritage and culture and promote tolerance and an understanding of others.
“Its important to embrace those who might be outcasts or different,” she said. “My message is one of peace and love and embracing diversity.”
Curnett told the students that in the over half a century since 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, mass atrocities continue to take place across the globe.
“Don’t think that atrocities like the Holocaust only happened in the past,” she said. “They are happening today all over the world. It’s not ancient history. It’s the present day. We must never forget what happened then and we must not forget what’s happening now.”